4 ms·

Harshly put, but the point is a good one. It feels incongruous for an upstart startup to say using upstart startup software is too risky - especially for someth

by rfrey 5y ago

Harshly put, but the point is a good one. It feels incongruous for an upstart startup to say using upstart startup software is too risky - especially for something as fungible as project management software. Seems more like a lack of imagination than prudence.

marcinzm 5y ago
Startups are risky. Adding more risk on top of that without specific expected gains in an area that doesn’t incur much ongoing cost is a bad business decision.
- henning 5y ago
  - marcinzm 5y ago
    Honestly most bad startup organizational or engineering decisions I've seen were due to focusing on personal pet peeves and hatreds rather than logic or risk understanding. So I try to not do that.
    - rosslazer 5y ago
      Yeah personally I hate JIRA. I have no idea why their cloud is so slow for SELECT statements with 10 items, field config incomprehensible, or features randomly churn on weekly basis. That being said we evaluated other options as a team and were not convinced that the newer tooling was worth it. Our plan B was to spin up Bugzilla since we leave the project/task management process up to each team. If anyone has seriously found something better we'd love to try it out.
      - _jordan 5y ago
        https://linear.app/ https://linear.app/ this one looks pretty good. I used https://www.broadcom.com/products/software/value-stream-management/rally https://www.broadcom.com/products/software/value-stream-mana... at a previous gig and really liked it
    - henning 5y ago
      Your startup will probably fail because the product sucks and the founders suck. Whether you use JIRA or Trello or a sticky note on your monitor is utterly irrelevant.
  - mrtrollmaster69 5y ago
- jasfi 5y ago
  I agree, you need to de-risk your startup, not the opposite. After all, lots of startups fail because of the risk involved.
  - jayparth 5y ago
    I agree with your point generally, but this is project management software we are talking here. It’s not like this is a year old product you’re betting on. Dude even Asana has been out for like 10 years. I will state this plainly. It’s laziness. He knows how to use Jira and doesn’t want to spend time learning a new tool. There is no risk involved with these anymore. It’s not a risk, it’s effort. Using Jira is a form of organizational debt. He didn’t want to put in the work up front to set up something better because he knew Jira already, which is fine. But everyone on the engineering team pays the price every day now because Jira is awful. You have to decide, is it worth spending 10 hours on the weekend learning Linear or do I make my whole organization suffer? He chose the former. But it’s not a risk mitigation thing. It’s a time trade-off thing.
    - maccard 5y ago
      I've used "big" Jira, notion, small Jira, Trello and linear - Jira is still my choice out of all of the above. Usually the problem with Jira is that an organisation enforces everyone to use one Jira instance, but teams in the org want to use different workflows. One wants story points, one wants t shirt sizes, both want them to be "requirements" and you end up with a badly configured Jira instance that requires you to fill in a bunch of fields. JQL is great, albeit slow on large instances but show me the equivalent filter on youtrack for "show me all of the tasks user X had completed that are still pending review in the last 12 months" in an instance with 100k+ issues that is any faster.

by rfrey 5y ago

marcinzm 5y ago

Startups are risky. Adding more risk on top of that without specific expected gains in an area that doesn’t incur much ongoing cost is a bad business decision.

henning 5y ago
- marcinzm 5y ago
  Honestly most bad startup organizational or engineering decisions I've seen were due to focusing on personal pet peeves and hatreds rather than logic or risk understanding. So I try to not do that.
  - rosslazer 5y ago
    Yeah personally I hate JIRA. I have no idea why their cloud is so slow for SELECT statements with 10 items, field config incomprehensible, or features randomly churn on weekly basis. That being said we evaluated other options as a team and were not convinced that the newer tooling was worth it. Our plan B was to spin up Bugzilla since we leave the project/task management process up to each team. If anyone has seriously found something better we'd love to try it out.
    - _jordan 5y ago
      https://linear.app/ https://linear.app/ this one looks pretty good. I used https://www.broadcom.com/products/software/value-stream-management/rally https://www.broadcom.com/products/software/value-stream-mana... at a previous gig and really liked it
  - henning 5y ago
    Your startup will probably fail because the product sucks and the founders suck. Whether you use JIRA or Trello or a sticky note on your monitor is utterly irrelevant.
- mrtrollmaster69 5y ago
jasfi 5y ago
I agree, you need to de-risk your startup, not the opposite. After all, lots of startups fail because of the risk involved.
- jayparth 5y ago
  I agree with your point generally, but this is project management software we are talking here. It’s not like this is a year old product you’re betting on. Dude even Asana has been out for like 10 years. I will state this plainly. It’s laziness. He knows how to use Jira and doesn’t want to spend time learning a new tool. There is no risk involved with these anymore. It’s not a risk, it’s effort. Using Jira is a form of organizational debt. He didn’t want to put in the work up front to set up something better because he knew Jira already, which is fine. But everyone on the engineering team pays the price every day now because Jira is awful. You have to decide, is it worth spending 10 hours on the weekend learning Linear or do I make my whole organization suffer? He chose the former. But it’s not a risk mitigation thing. It’s a time trade-off thing.
  - maccard 5y ago
    I've used "big" Jira, notion, small Jira, Trello and linear - Jira is still my choice out of all of the above. Usually the problem with Jira is that an organisation enforces everyone to use one Jira instance, but teams in the org want to use different workflows. One wants story points, one wants t shirt sizes, both want them to be "requirements" and you end up with a badly configured Jira instance that requires you to fill in a bunch of fields. JQL is great, albeit slow on large instances but show me the equivalent filter on youtrack for "show me all of the tasks user X had completed that are still pending review in the last 12 months" in an instance with 100k+ issues that is any faster.